Want to do something a little different when you get together as a family at night? Try family craft night. Your best bet is to schedule it on the day before you plan to do a big house cleaning because the last thing you want is glitter on your carpets (though a quick vaccum run when you are done and that’s cleaned up). As for doing crafts together, it’s a fun way to spend time with mom, dad and the little ones that make the kids feel special and the adults amused.
What Do You Make?
Well a lot depends on what you have available on hand and it’s important that you target the craft as being age-appropriate. It’s important that your child be allowed to do their project with your company, but not you doing it yourself. If your child is young, you want an easy to do project that is safe and fun. You can get more complex with your older children.
Some popular ones that are great for older kids are the paint by numbers kits. You can still find them in the Michael’s craft stores and they are challenging and offer a great reward when the child is done. You may go for coloring sheets for younger ones or glue and glitter projects that are very popular with younger children.
Hands Across the World
My daughter was fascinated with hands for a while and every craft project we did involved hands of some sort. She liked to draw our hands and then draw her own inside them. Other popular projects with pens, pencils and crayons are drawing faces and storytelling projects that reveal what will happen next.
You can also try doing shadow silhouettes as another project that can be fun for kids to do that are ready for or have mastered the use of scissors. Collages are ideal for many ages and can actually be worked on as a group project or individually to put together.
Be Together
Whatever projects you end up choosing – the idea is for you and your family to do it together. Last Christmas, my mother and I took eighteen baby food jars and one large cookie jar and made Nutcracker heads out of the baby food jars and a Santa Claus out of the cookie jar. We put gum drops inside the nutcrackers and cookies in the Santa Claus and sent the whole lot off to my daughter’s pre-school for her Christmas party.
During my daughter’s birthday party, we threw a Harry Potter birthday party and loaded it up with crafts from making wands with dowels, pipe cleaners, feathers, glitter and glitter paint to making birthday party (wizard hats) with cones and sticker stars. Other projects included face painting and wipe on tattoos.
It was a pretty fun party and my daughter loves it when we sit down and make things with her – sooner or later she and I are going to get to our quilt –we picked out our pattern and the fabrics!
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